Five tips on protecting your business and customers from fraud

Protecting your business

If you are a business or start-up, especially one which is a platform serving many users and accepting payments on that platform, you should be thinking about fraud risk and how exposed your platform might be to this risk. John Canfield, VP of Risk for WePay – a payments API provider powering hundreds of platforms, shares his top five tips on protecting your business in his own words below.

1. Know your enemy

First, you have to understand whom the enemy of your platform or marketplace is. You might not realize that there are lots of different kind of fraud and loss – including merchant identity fraud, merchant credit risk and buyer identity fraud. Most likely, you’ll be concerned with collusion fraud. What this means is someone setting up a merchant or fundraiser account with a fake or stolen identity, then using stolen credits and fake buyer identities to pay their own merchant account. They get the money and disappear, but you are stuck with the charges.

2. Simple tools to start

One of the first things you can do is actually pretty traditional. Using a vendor like Experian, Equifax, or Lexis-Nexis, you can validate that your user’s identity is a real one that matches their database. If needed, you can also check their business credit and history.

3. Social data as your secret weapon

However, to get more advanced, you should consider social data. It is easy enough to do a social search based off an email address – you can see whether someone has a Facebook or LinkedIn profile and whether it matches a verified email they gave you. A long-established social profile that matches their name and e-mail is an asset they have that is difficult for a fraudster to synthesize. WePay uses social data and algorithms to power our own Veda^TM risk analysis engine. 

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